Although most businesses have robust change control procedures, there is no guarantee that these are followed 100% of the time, and human beings have been known to tweak configurations without accurately recording the changes they've made. Moving the network configuration to Ansible removes this issue, as the configuration is a known state defined by the playbooks that can be compared easily to the running configuration using a check run.

Not only is this possible, but configurations can be backed up and restored with ease. Say, for example, a switch fails and has to be replaced. If the replacement is the same type, it can be configured and brought into service rapidly by running the Ansible playbooks, perhaps limited to just the replacement switch if appropriate.

This lends itself to version control too—network configuration playbooks can be pushed to a source control repository, enabling configuration versions to be tracked, and differences over time to be easily examined.